Data Journalism: Investigating Data with R 1-3. Hands-on. [B+I]

Hands-on. Beginner [B]-Intermediate [I].

Sooner or later you know you’ll come up against a dataset so big it’s going to crash Excel if you even try to open it. Maybe your questions are becoming too complex for Excel’s built-in analytics tools to handle. Maybe you find yourself frequently updating a dataset or running the same calculations for your reporting. Or you just want to automate some of the collection or visualisation of a dataset.

If these are the problems you face, then R is your friend! And here’s your chance to get to know it better.

By the end of these three sessions you will have learned the basics of using R and its most popular interface RStudio. You will know how to explore your data and run common analysis tasks.

These sessions can be taken as a whole course, but can also be taken as individual modules.

You do not need to have any prior coding or data experience to take this course.
Documentation will be provided to help you continue your learning after the conference.

Investigating Data with R – 1: First steps [B]
You’ve heard of R as a tool for data analysis, you may even have tried it and found it too difficult. In this session we will get you over the hump of getting started, writing code to do in a few words things which you would need lots of instructions to do with Excel or Googlesheets. You will begin to understand what your code is doing, and how to use key functions to ask your data journalistic questions.
All sessions will be done using a cloud version of R – no installation necessary.

Investigating Data with R -1: Visualisation [B+I]
in this session we will concentrate on visualisation using R’s ever popular ggplot package. We will also show you a couple of cheats to help you learn more as you go.
All sessions will be done using a cloud version of R – no installation necessary.

Investigating Data with R – 1: Scraping [B+I]
In this session we will look at how to scrape web pages with R’s rvest package. And we will talk about the various ways you can get AI to help you write R code, and perform more and more complex tasks.
All sessions will be done using a cloud version of R – no installation necessary.

Technical Requirements

These sessions will make use of a cloud version of R and RStudio so there’s no need to bring anything other than a laptop capable of accessing the internet. At the end you will be able to access your R files and packages for a couple of months, allowing you time to decide to install R and RStudio on your own computer if you want to.

27 June 2025 – Data Journalism: Investigating Data with R 1-3. Hands-on. [B+I]

10:00–11:00

Investigating Data with R: First steps

10:20–11:20

Investigating Data with R: Visualisation

14:50–15:50

Investigating Data with R: Scraping

Jonathan Stoneman

Jonathan Stoneman is a freelance trainer specialising in data journalism. He has been working with data since 2010. Before that he worked at the BBC – as a reporter, producer, editor of output in Macedonian and Croatian, and finally as head of training at BBC World Service.

Helena Bengtsson

Helena Bengtsson is the data journalism editor at Gota Media, a regional publishing company in the south of Sweden with 13 local titles. She previously worked as the data journalism editor at Sveriges Television, Sweden’s national television broadcaster, for 27 years and has also served as Editor, Data Projects of the Guardian UK between 2014-2017.

27 June 2025 10.00–15.50

Location: PSH 314

Course

Beginner

Intermediate

Data